While they are still long shot odds, and only one team has ever made the playoffs after starting the season 0-4 (Chargers, 1992) since the league merger, the Broncos have a unique opportunity over the back stretch of the season.
Brandon Krisztal joined Benjamin Allbright and Ryan Edwards on Broncos Country Tonight on KOA radio and brought up a really interesting point as it relates to the rest of Denver’s schedule.
If you look at the remaining games Denver has to play, it is the who’s who of the current AFC rankings, aside from New England and Baltimore.
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Now, this also means that Denver has a lot of good teams to play, that are ranked higher than them in the AFC standings, but it also means they have a shot to have the head to head tie-breaker with any of these teams.
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It’s tough sledding, but if Denver can find a way to knock off the Chiefs on Thursday, that puts them only one game back from Kansas City in the division and gives them a real shot to go into the bye week sitting at something like 4-5, with a lot of momentum on their side.
I’m not claiming it will happen, or that it’s even very probable, but Denver will have a great opportunity over the back half of this schedule to really see how they shape up against the majority of the top teams in the conference. A conference that, aside from New England and Kansas City, doesn’t really have a lot of clear standouts after that.
I think whoever doesn’t win the division of the Texans or Colts will take one of the Wild Card slots, Baltimore likely wins their division and I fully expect the Bills to implode, so that last spot, at least at this point, doesn’t look as challenging as the NFC where you have four 5- win teams and two 4-win teams.
Anything can happen, but it starts with taking care of business on Thursday night.